In Books, As In Life,

It Is Useless Either To Hate Or To Love Truth - But It Should Be Noticed.

One Must Avoid Ambition In Order To Write. Otherwise Something Else Is The Goal: Some Kind Of Power Beyond The Power Of Language. And The Power Of Language, It Seems To Me, Is The Only Kind Of Power A Writer Is Entitled To.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

Fiction Does Not Invent Out Of A Vacuum, But It Invents; And What It Invents Is, First, The Fabric And Cadence Of Language, And Then A Slant Of Idea That Sails Out Of These As A Fin Lifts From The Sea.

Old Saws Have No Teeth.